And they had loved each other so that his own intelligence, on the higher line, had temporarily paid for it.

The futilities, the enormities, the depravities, of decoration and ingenuity, that, before his sense was unsealed, she had made him think lovely! Musing, reconsidering little man that he was, and addicted to silent pleasures--as he was accessible to silent pains--he even sometimes wondered what would have become of his intelligence, in the sphere in which it was to learn more and more exclusively to play, if his wife's influence upon it had not been, in the strange scheme of things, so promptly removed.

Would she have led him altogether, attached as he was to her, into the wilderness of mere mistakes?
Would she have prevented him from ever scaling his vertiginous Peak ?--or would she, otherwise, have been able to accompany him to that eminence, where he might have pointed out to her, as Cortez to HIS companions, the revelation vouchsafed?
No companion of Cortez had presumably been a real lady: Mr.Verver allowed that historic fact to determine his inference.
VIII What was at all events not permanently hidden from him was a truth much less invidious about his years of darkness.

It was the strange scheme of things again: the years of darkness had been needed to render possible the years of light.

A wiser hand than he at first knew had kept him hard at acquisition of one sort as a perfect preliminary to acquisition of another, and the preliminary would have been weak and wanting if the good faith of it had been less.